In the current market environment, particularly in regard to office equipment such as printers, copiers, and computers, an economic premium is placed on the ability for vendors, which lease or rent such equipment, to interact with a customer regarding the status of the office equipment, including the type of and the amount of use to which the office equipment is being dedicated. While such usage information is particularly helpful to a vendor in providing accurate and timely services to support the operation of the office equipment, such information also provides the vendor with information necessary to accurately bill the customer for the use of the office equipment pursuant to the leasing or rental agreements, hereinafter referred to as “agreements.” For instance, each printer or copier under an agreement can include a metering device which records the number of sheets of paper being copied or printed on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Such information can be required under certain agreements to enable the vendor to provide accurate and timely invoices to the customer.
Getting accurate and timely meter readings from devices located at a customer facility in the field is therefore particularly desirable. In many of these agreements, vendor access to such information is a key enabler to bill the customer and to provide other services. In most of these agreements, the customer is contractually obligated to provide this data. Once the data is received at the vendor location, the data is validated to insure that the data represents an accurate representation of the amount of copies being made or printed. In some cases, automated systems are put in place to gather usage data from devices in the field and to transmit the usage data to the vendor, either from individual devices or through proxies that aggregate usage data from many devices.
While the collection and transmission of data by a customer and to a vendor is technically possible under certain conditions, some customers can be unwilling to transmit such usage information automatically through a communication network due to network security concerns. Oftentimes, the information technology (IT) department of such customers does not allow machine or device data to leave the customer's facility. When a device or a proxy sends the data automatically, the IT department does not have a mechanism to check all of the data that is being generated and transmitted, so the transmission of the data is blocked, even though the data most often includes only meter readings, which is not typically considered sensitive data.
Due to security concerns, various methods have been developed to provide alternative and acceptable transmission methods. One such method is manual and time intensive in nature. This manual method occurs where a customer goes from one machine to the next machine to write down the billing meter information. Once the meter information is gathered, the customer makes a phone call to a vendor service representative or to an on-site data analyst who records the data manually. This method, and others like it of manually gathering information, requires continued attention on the part of the customer, which may not always be present due to more pressing concerns of the business. In addition, the customer can be frustrated by the phone-in process, since the appropriate service representative may not be available when called. The manual method can also be prone to errors.
In other situations, the information is electronically recorded to electronic media, such as a thumb drive, if this type of capability is enabled and is authorized by the customer. The information can then be e-mailed or physically carried back to the vendor. In some cases, however, the act of physically carrying the data collected from network devices to a vendor can also be a security violation. Consequently, in those situations where a customer restricts access to billing information, the resulting loss in revenue can be very large.